I get in the car and drive home.
Do people ever stop thinking of their childhood houses, cities, towns as home? I’ve lived away from Sutter’s Point nearly as long as I lived in it, and still it’s where I’m going now to seek out answers and comfort. I can phone my father, but my interrogation is a face-to-face one. My mother is still in that house too. I want both of them there.
Tomorrow’s Sunday. I don’t have to worry about preparing dough or opening the bakery. I put the mess in the kitchen out of my mind. Seamus probably will take care of it anyway. He’ll be worried, looking for me tonight, in the morning. I tell myself I owe him nothing, no explanations, no courtesy calls, no excuses, really. The coolness of my internal protests unsettles me. I thought I’d been making progress in the relationship arena.
The sun sinks behind the mountains as I drive, a cling peach stewed in its own juices, the horizon saturated with cool orange light. I scan through the FM stations. The radio doesn’t block my thoughts. I make conversation in my head, practice posing difficult questions to my father. My mother too. I think over the inches of my life, feeling through the pockets and zippers and lint-caked corners, trying to recall some hint of—anything—indicating I am not their biological child.
Nothing.
In first grade, Deena Howard told everyone she’d been adopted. She’d known for, well, as long as she had the ability to know things. Her parents didn’t keep it a secret from her; as a small child, the story of her origins was a favorite bedtime tale. Her mother drew pictures and wrote a poem about it and stapled the pages together, and they would read it together before the good-night kiss and lights-out song. Deena brought the handmade storybook in for show-and-tell, and when I came home from school, I slurped down my mother’s chicken noodle soup and told her, “Deena Howard got adopted. That means her mommy and daddy bought her as a baby.” I have no memory of the conversation beyond that, if my mother corrected my inaccurate definition or if she said anything at all. I only remember the soup, not too hot, the chicken shredded into toothpick-sized strips, the potatoes nice and mushy, and little, slick oil bubbles bobbing over the surface. I didn’t look at her when I told her; I was trying to keep the carrots off my spoon.
Another friend, in high school, confided in me about her adoption. Her parents revealed it to her only days before, when she turned sixteen. Of all the emotions she felt and was still feeling, surprise wasn’t one of them. “I never fit,” she said. “I never truly felt a part of them.”
I have no feelings like that. I always seemed the perfect-sized puzzle piece, like the baby Jesus hand-carved and balanced in Mary’s arms in my grandmother’s antique German crèche. She would wiggle him out just so in order for me to hold him, and then when I finished turning his tiny, crazed body over in my hands, she gently maneuvered him back into place, so firmly in the virgin’s grasp that not even my knocking the figures off the side table shook him loose.
Still, I have no doubt the words of the woman on the phone are true.
As I drive, it’s this certainty with which I wrestle. Why do I believe it? Why don’t I discount the woman as a hoaxer or a loon and simply put the conversation away, into a place I’ll never visit again? I pull into the driveway of my childhood home, the answer settled. I know because Truth recognizes truth.
I haven’t been here to visit in three years, not since Wild Rise opened, despite living only two hours away. The front door is unlocked; I go inside and am struck by how little has changed over the years. The couch. The mat in the entryway. A soap dispenser on the kitchen sink. A telephone. The television. Otherwise, it’s the same as the day my mother died.
“Dad?”
He doesn’t answer. I open the basement door, the light on down there, and descend to my father’s workshop, to a room that’s really not more than a cellar, with an uneven stone floor and damp walls, and beams sticky with cobwebs above. He’s standing at his bench—always stands when he tinkers—unscrewing some small part from some bigger one, bug-eyed safety glasses across his face. “Dad,” I say again.
Looking up, Alistair wipes his thumbs across the goggles and then simply snaps them off his head, knocking his prescription lenses from his nose. He fumbles to reclaim those before they fall to the floor, and he does, catching them against his shirt before tucking them back onto his face. “Liesl. Did I forget you were coming?”
“No.”
“Then why are you here? Not that you’re not welcome any—”
“Who is Mary Lombardo?”
“Lombardi.” He sets down his screwdriver. “It’s Lombardi.”
He takes off his glasses again, huffs on them. Wipes them on the hem of his shirt. Sighs. “Mary Lombardi.”
“Yeah.”
“We should go upstairs.” And then, as if he’s decided he has no right to ask anything of me, he adds, “Please?”
I nod, wait to follow him. In the kitchen, he motions to a chair and I sit. “Your mother would make that tea of hers. In the milk.”
“With honey,” I say.
“And bread. Always, always bread.”
“Sometimes she made muffins.”
“I suppose you’re right.” He takes two white teacups from the cabinet beside the refrigerator, each ringed with brown stains. “You’ll have to settle for scorched coffee. I did brew it this morning, though. Not yesterday.”
“It’s fine, Dad.”
He pours the black liquid into the cups; they rattle in the saucers as he carries them and slides them both in front of me. I move one across the table as he brings a carton of milk and the sugar bowl. “I’m out of half-and-half.” He sits, opens the carton, and sniffs. Wrinkles his nose. Turns the container and checks the date. “I’m not sure this is good still.”
“Just sugar is fine.” I add a teaspoon. He adds three and then splashes the suspect milk into his cup anyway. He stirs the coffee, spoon chattering against the porcelain. Sips.
“We never meant to keep it from you.”
I wait. His glasses come off again and he rubs his eyes until they redden. “How did you . . . I mean, what—”
“I got a call today from . . . a woman who said she was my half sister. I didn’t get everything she was saying. It was kind of a . . . shock and I, well, I hung up on her.”
“She saw you on television?”
“Yes. I think so. How did you—”
“You look so much like her. Mary, I mean.”
“You know her, then.”
He grabs the skin of his cheek and pulls at it absently, releases and repeats, making a wet, sucking sound. “Where to start.”
“The beginning?”
He sighs again. “Your mother loved you more than anything, you know? She loved you so much, even before she knew you, that she wouldn’t do anything to harm you. And that meant, to her, giving birth to you. She wouldn’t allow even the possibility her . . . illness would be passed on to her child.
“We were married, oh, eighteen months or so when it started. The sadness. The odd behavior. I didn’t know who I was living with, this stranger who sometimes went days without leaving the bedroom closet, or days without coming home. I was ready to give up on her, and then she . . . well, she bought bottles of pills from the pharmacy and took them all. Someone found her in a movie theater, unconscious, and called for an ambulance. It was in the hospital they gave it a name. Manic depression.
“It took another couple of years to truly get her back to being my Claudia. By then she wanted a child, and so did I, but we waited. We wanted to be certain she was truly stable. So nearly ten years after we were married we adopted you.”
My father—yes, still my father; I won’t let my world tilt so far as to shake him from this position yet—swallows some more coffee. I take a sip too, and it’s like drinking sweetened smoke, the taste in my mouth that comes when I smell a wood burning stove on a frigid day.
“Things were different when you were born. Now, people get married all the time and don’t have k
ids. Then it was assumed we were trying and couldn’t get pregnant, and we let everyone believe that. Your mother’s doctor had no problem deeming us infertile after ten years of marriage and no babies. We used that on the adoption application. We also, for wrong or right, didn’t disclose Claudia’s condition. We were afraid no woman would give her baby to a couple with such a family secret.
“It didn’t take long for the call to come. A young woman picked us to adopt her baby. Mary Lombardi. We met her once, before you were born, at the agency office. She was seventeen and scared but also determined. She left the meeting and we were there, oh, I don’t know, several more hours filling out paperwork and making arrangements, and all that time she waited for us in the parking lot, and when we got back to our car she gave Claudia a little square of paper and said she had no right to ask, but would we consider letting her know how you were doing from time to time? Your mother hugged her and said she would. And she did. Every year around your birthday she sent a photo and letter. After she died, I didn’t think about it until I found Mary’s address in some of Claudia’s papers. It was a PO box. You were about twenty, I think. I scribbled a quick note about Claudia’s passing and let her know you were well and in college, and that I wouldn’t be sending any more correspondence now that you were an adult. I don’t know if Mary received it or not.”
Finishing his coffee, Alistair pushes back from the table and pours a refill. He opens the small cabinet above the stove hood, reaches back, and removes a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. “I knew I was saving this for something,” he says, shuffling back to me. He spills some liqueur into his cup, drinks deeply.
“You said you were going to tell me.”
“We were, your mother and I. We discussed it until we turned blue and croaky. We went back and forth on when the right time was. Eventually we settled on you being twelve or thirteen, somewhere in there. Claudia wanted you to be able to understand the reason for it, all of it. She didn’t want to scare you with details of her illness too soon. She thought you’d be able to handle it then.”
“But she died.”
Alistair nodded. “She died. And I chose not to say anything because I didn’t want you to lose her twice.”
We’re silent. My father fiddles with the Baileys cap; if he had coffee left in his cup, I’m certain he’d add more alcohol. I feel like I’ve had a few too many drinks, all woozy-headed and working too hard to put all I’ve heard in tidy order. It’s nearly eleven. “I think I’ll crash here tonight,” I say.
“I’ll get some sheets.”
“No,” I tell him, sharp little teeth in my voice. I take a deep breath. “No. It’s okay. I’ll get them.”
He closes his eyes. “Don’t hate us.”
I nod, knowing I should hug him, a quick squeeze around his shoulders, but I have no comfort to offer.
I’ll find that bottle empty in the morning.
Upstairs, I open the linen closet, a narrow door between the bathroom and my bedroom, painted white and raised-paneled. It was my favorite door as a child because the knob is violet glass, faceted until it sparkles. The others in the house are white or brown, ceramic-like, cool, smooth eggs in my hand. I would pretend the special knob was put there by a fairy, and if I opened the door at the right time, I’d find passage to her magical land. I decided the time would be the stroke of midnight, and I would stare at the ceiling, chanting, “Stay awake, stay awake,” eventually hearing my parents turn off the television, brush their teeth, flush the toilet, and close their bedroom door. “Stay awake, stay awake.” But I couldn’t. And by the time I was old enough to make it to midnight, I didn’t believe in fairy stories anymore.
The sheets aren’t folded, but balled and shoved onto the shelves. I find a fitted and flat one for the twin bed in my old room; they don’t match but it doesn’t matter. In my room, I move the plastic totes of Christmas tree lights and Alistair’s old sweaters from the bed to the floor and make up the bare mattress. Switching on the ceiling fan, removing my skirt and sandals, I climb under the thin sheet. I shiver, but don’t get up to lower the fan speed, and fall asleep listening to the rattle of the pull chain against the light globe.
Seventeen
I want you to come to church with me, my father says.
I’m sixteen, angry, ignoring his words and Christmas Eve, the fourth since she’s been gone. The first since his new best friend is Jesus. I watch a Lifetime movie about finding the perfect man for the holidays, even if he happens to be a former convict in a Santa hat. My father stands in front of the television, wearing galoshes with his only suit, his parka, and a woolen hat with ear flaps. He holds my own peacoat out, an offering.
Liesl.
I heard you.
Get your coat on.
I’m not going.
He drapes the coat over the arm of the sofa and leaves the room. The kitchen door hinges squeak. I hear the garage open, the car start—a Taurus, purchased the month after my mother died, her Buick traded to a dealership without its history disclosed; does the new owner sense what took place where she sits?—and the garage door once more, closing now.
I’ve defeated him. Again.
The battles give me purpose. How many ways am I able to pierce him? How many times will he struggle to his feet after I strike? This is my crusade, declared against him because he dares move on with his life. And he must turn the other cheek. His God commands it of him.
The front door opens and my father is back. He gropes the length of the television set, touching buttons until the screen goes black, the picture sucked into the center before it disappears. I don’t ask much. I don’t know that I ask anything. This once, please, come to church with me.
I snuggle into the leather sofa, my head on the wide, puffed arm, and, tugging my coat over my body, close my eyes.
If you don’t come, you won’t get your driver’s license.
His words electrocute me, and in a surge of defiance I’m standing before him, almost as tall as he is, my pupils dilating with venom. You can’t do that.
It’s done.
In one strike he has amputated my limbs. All of them. I can remain here, at home, and bleed to death. Or for the sake of my teenaged social life, I can allow the stretcher to carry me from the field of battle, have my own gushing wounds dressed, grow stronger, and devise a new strategy with which to crush him.
This is not for you, I say.
I turn, walk into my own rubber boots waiting near the door, cross the snow-covered lawn, and slip into the car. It’s frigid outside; my nostrils freeze and my throat tastes of metal in the few moments I’m exposed to the air. I wear thin Tweety Bird pajama pants and a sweatshirt. My father brings my coat but I won’t use it. When he covers my lap with it, I ball it up and heave it into the backseat.
I remain silent. My father introduces me to people before the service. I ignore them and their I’ve heard so much about you’s, crossing my arms over my chest—I’m also braless—and staring at some invisible point above their heads and to the left. I see Sara Kempf standing not far from us. She nods to me. I turn my head. During the worship time, I slump in the chair. I don’t stand. I don’t sing. I don’t open any hymnal to page two hundred and whatever-whatever. I don’t light a candle and hold it toward the ceiling as far as my arm will stretch, at the end of “Silent Night” in representation of the Light of the World.
I seethe.
Two old women serve birthday cake for Jesus in the lobby. The children clamor around first, frosting on their fingers and in their hair. We don’t stay, and this time the car is freezing when we get into it.
Only a fifteen-minute drive home.
My father turns the radio on and scans, choosing a station playing instrumental renditions of holiday songs. “Joy to the World” ends, and then another arrangement I recognize but can’t name until the announcer identifies it as “Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”
And then—
No, I breathe.
“Es ist ein Ros e
ntsprungen.” My mother’s most beloved Christmas carol.
I clench my teeth so I won’t sob, but my tears flow without sound. My father sniffs, and I roll my eyes toward him as far as possible, until they throb, and in the headlights of the oncoming vehicles, see him crying as well.
I haven’t stopped missing her, he says. I never will.
He feels around for my hand—I sit on them for warmth—and I bite my lip as his fingers dig it out from beneath my bruised thigh. But I let him. And when he squeezes it, I squeeze back.
I wake in a tight ball beneath the sheet, head tucked between my knees, toes as cold as timid souls. Out of bed, I throw on my skirt and dig a sweater from the castoffs, an ecru cotton button-up without its buttons. Another clear tote holds boxer shorts and sport socks. I snag a pair for my feet and carry my shoes downstairs. I hear my father’s snores, loud and full of gravel, from the bedroom down the hall.
In the kitchen, I check the refrigerator for something to drink before I go. A plastic bottle of Tropicana, expired two months ago. The milk from last night, stuck back on the top shelf rather than dumped down the sink. A couple of apple juice boxes, and why he has these I can’t imagine. I take one anyway, tapping the straw on my leg to remove the wrapper and then popping it through the foil hole. I’m so dry my saliva is sticky, bitter, and I suck down the entire box, squeezing the cardboard to get the final mouthful. I drink the second one too and toss both empties in the garbage can. The Baileys bottle is at the bottom, half-covered with a paper towel.
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